John Binder: 'UFORIA' (1981, 1985)

John Binder's UFOria, a low budget gem made in 1981 but not released until 1985, somehow fell through the cracks of mass consciousness. 

I was lucky enough to see the film many years ago on video, and never forgot it. It hasn't to date been released on DVD or Blu-ray, nor has it been chosen for salvation by the Criterion Collection, but it sticks with me. In fact, rather magically, I was able to see it again recently! 

UFOria makes up in dialogue, good-natured satire and an excellent cast of characters what it lacks in budgeted technical virtuosity. All the actors fit their characters seamlessly, whether they have a lot of lines or just a choice few. These include Cindy "I am gonna be Noah" Williams (Laverne & Shirley), Fred "get the net, boys" Ward (Henry & June), Harry Dean "I believe I'll have a drink" Stanton (Big Love, Twin Peaks: The Return) and Hank "just for playsure" Worden (Twin Peaks).  The whole script is quotable -- I could still remember many of UFOria's juiciest lines years after last watching it. And: the soundtrack is perfectly attuned to the characters. 

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Finale

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

On Gregory Corso. "He's dealt with truth,  god, love, hate, hope, beauty, so it's actually very interesting. He's taken what he would call the biggies, the big themes, and dealt with them in one or two lines each. Appreciation, but nonattachment, not getting addicted." (p. 341)

William Blake. "The Eye Altering Alters All" [circa 1803.] (p. 347)

William Carlos Williams, 1953: "For man and poet must keep pace with his world." (p. [359])

Ginsberg: "I was high on grass and so it was triply awesome or doubly awesome, the realization that the mind could be spaced out and then come back and focus. . . an aspect of the notion of a gap or jump from one phase of consciousness to another, one unconscious daydreaming to a real place, a focus on the external phenomenal world." (pp. 364-365)

". . . I started looking . . . to ordinary-mind observations for visionary perceptions." (p. 366)

William Carlos Williams: "'. . . make a coordinate point where others can see, compare their perceptions with your perceptions.'" (p. 367)

Ginsberg: "We'd burn all night on the jackpine peak, seen from Denver in the summer dark . . ." (p. 372)

"Old love and remembrance -- I resign
All cities, all jazz, all echoes of Time . . ." p. 381)

"As in movies, the poignancy or charge or visionary aspect or satori or sunyata or mental electric comes from setting up one pole of thought form or word or picture and then setting up another pole. Then the mind has to fill in the space between by connecting them. . . like an electric charge between the two poles . . . One minute it's somebody talking, the next minute it's a tombstone." (pp. 388-389) 

"Naturally there's going to be a little brain pop." (pp. [390]-391)

". . . the constant awareness of setting something down which other people will read." (p. 393)

"Howl." "The precursors to this were things like Apollinaire's poem "Zone." The parallel texts . . . in addition to . . . "Zone . . . were Christopher Smart's "Rejoice in the Lamb," which has the same construction."  (p. 395)

Surrealistic method. "Hop up your image with some totally opposite zonk. You zonk the image with something so weird that people will ask, 'How'd you get to that?'" (p. 396)

Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: Possessions.

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part II

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov were our favorite books then . . . (p. 101).

Visions of Cody. "I had the idea that Kerouac was influenced by Neal [Cassady] reading [Marcel] Proust aloud. In 1947 when Cassady was in town we had a copy of Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust and Neal would read that aloud when we were high on grass. He read Proust very beautifully and . . . enjoyed the long organic sentences that were inclusive of many varieties of thought forms and associations that rose during the composition of the sentence. . . . as in [John] Milton, Proust used long sentences to include everything in his mind."  (pp. 105-106)

"When you hear yourself echoed in somebody else's indulgent, tender, sympathetic consciousness, you begin to appreciate yourself." (p. 115)

William S. Burroughs. "Burroughs ascribes Kerouac's enthusiasm and encouragement as the greatest single force in making him write, finally . . . Kerouac and I saw Burroughs as very shy, tender, and sweet, with good manners. Quiet with a sense of humor cutting through."  (p. 116)

Kerouac imagined writing an American Civil War book, with Burroughs as a "morphine-addicted . . . general." (pp. 120-121) 

Herman Melville and "American loneliness. The central image of that for Kerouac was everybody looking for 'the center of Saturday night in America' . . . in the back alley, under a redbrick building, under a neon sign, with nobody looking at him . . . which is where everybody wound up, unsatisfied." (pp. 121-122

"Visions of Cody is the most serious text we'll run into . . . Kerouac . . . undergoes a transfiguration and becomes his art, he ceases to be a guy writing at his art and becomes interchangeable with the art . . . His writing and his personality become identical and becomes a superprofessional in the sense that he's a saint of writing. (pp. 128-129)

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. For Burroughs, writing "was not so much . . . redemption, but . . . a communicative activity which linked him with me and other people, with the rest of humanity, with friends." He found writing to be more practical than "a romantic thing." (p. 153)

Burroughs "sees right through everything immediately with no illusions." (p. 164)

"Trace back along the word vine to find the source of control. Who started the whole maya, the illusion, and to what extent does language dictate to our sense of what we see, hear, smell." (p. 169)

Burroughs on New Orleans: "'The drivers orient themselves largely by the use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly. The transient population is conglomerate and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.'" (p. 171) 

Burroughs as visual writer. (pp. 179-180)

"The Waste Land is not much different from Burroughs . . . collage method . . . Apollinaire . . . I think that the thing Burroughs and Eliot have most in common is 'music down a windy street,' . . . spare, nostalgic, pungent images that will haunt you with an echo of time past." See also Saint-John Perse, Anabasis. (p. 188)

"His unconscious life and his every day life are merged. With Burroughs writing becomes a probe into consciousness, or a probe into depth." (p. 191)

". . . the entire fabric of appearance and phenomenon." (p. 199) 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part I

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman. 

Anne Waldman: "Denver, the place of all possible crossroads." (p. x)  "The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. (p. xi)

Each core member of the Beats "literarily had had some form of break in the ordinary nature of consciousness . . . as the central preoccupation, concern with the very nature of consciousness and with what you would call visions or visionary  experience." (P. 26)

"The element of aggression, of ideological insistency, was considered unhip and by unhip I mean lacking in awareness." (p. 29)

"I'm thinking of 'salt peanuts, salt peanuts,' or some squiggle of rhythm in [Jack] Kerouac's head that follows that off accenting, the irregular accenting, the noniambic accenting of [Dizzy] Gillespie." (p. 35)

With the death of his father, Kerouac "got interested in becoming the recording angel of the dream scene, and began recording his dreams, literally, as well as the dream of life itself." (p. 44) 

"The world hanging in space, the skyscrapers hanging in space . . . you'd realize you were not standing in New York City but you were standing in the middle of the universe, the vast open sky . . . It was the first discovery [by the main Beats, in the 1940s] of a crack in consciousness, that we were made of the same suchness, that we were ghosts. ' ' There's this early hint in On the Road of mind which is already Buddhist-oriented. Appreciating the phantom nature of things, of ourselves, an awareness of the mortal . . ." (p. 52)   

On meeting Jack: "Kerouac was a very mellow, shrewd, observant, tolerant person, so there was mutual curiosity." (p. 55)

Kerouac later "used to stand in the backyards at night when everybody was eating supper and realized that everybody was a ghost eating ghost food. Or that he was a ghost watching living people." (p. 56)

On meeting William S. Burroughs: "When we all went to see Burroughs, it was for that laconic, mellowed-out, cooled-out experience." (p. 86) 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline as a major influence. "I think it's one of the great moments of Western literature, when the hero wakes up in the middle of the battle and realizes that everyone around him is crazy and figures he better get out of there. I would say that is hipness, that attitude . . ." (p. 88)  

". . . little puppets of eternity, clawing each other in their vanity, with great clouds brewing overhead in the empty sky." (p. 96)

". . . panoramic consciousness or time consciousness . . ." (p. 98)

Kerouac: ". . . the flitting ghost-ends of a brood who will grow . . ." (p. 99)

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

David Lynch: Mulholland Drive (2001)

David Lynch: Mulholland Drive / Mulholland Dr. (2001). Starring Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Martínez Herring/Harring (Countess von Bismarck-Schönhausen) and Justin Theroux. 

After having seen everything David Lynch at least once, it's easier to go back and reconsider Mulholland Drive.

In short, what a cool, weird film!  Watts is also in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), and Harring has since enjoyed a strong turn as a lawyer in the FX series The Shield (2006), among other things.  

What is Mulholland Drive?  Are we delving into alternate realities, psychological realms, dreams, feeling-driven memory distortions, alternate state consciousness, hallucinatory experiences, floating through the bardo, a limbo-like state, or a blend of such elements with off-kilter surrealism?  You tell me. The final response will be: "Silencio."

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

Michelle Tea's 'Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms' (2018)

Michelle Tea, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2018. 

An eclectic collection of essays and memoir, or anti-memoir. The CONTENTS may give some idea of its scope.

"ART & MUSIC
On Valerie Solanas; Andy Warhol's Self-Portrait; Times Square; On Erin Markey; On Chelsea Girls; Gene Loves Jezebel; Purple Rain; Minor Threat; Sonic Youth's Magic.

LOVE & QUEERNESS
Transmissions from Camp Trans [and the Michigan Womyn's Music Fest]; How Not to Be a Queer Douchebag; Polishness; Hard Times; HAGS in Your Face; How to Refer to My Husband-Wife.

WRITING & LIFE
The City to a Young Girl; Pigeon Manifesto; Summer of Lost Jobs; Telling Your Friends You're Sober; Sister Spit Feminism; I Had a Miscarriage; Baba; Dire Straits; Against Memoir."

In the first section, Tea, though she's younger than I am, covers music, movies and books with which I'm mostly familiar. At some point in my early twenties I even picked up a copy of the soundtrack to Times Square, from a cutout bin for maybe a dollar or two, though to this day I haven't seen the movie yet. 

From "Times Square:" "We queers, artists, activists, intellectuals, misfits, know with the instinct of any migrating animal that we must go to the city to find ourselves, our lives, and our people. Times Square shows beautifully what is lost to us when we lose our cities, our scruffy, scuzzy, cheap, and accessible cities; our inspiring, cultured, miraculous, dangerous, spontaneous, surprising cities."  (pages 37-38).

In the second section, I found two pieces particularly interesting, "Transmissions" and "HAGS in Your Face." 

From "HAGS in Your Face:" "'We always wanted to be next to each other.'" (page 180). A nice turn of phrase.

In the final section, all are absorbing to varying degrees. "Pigeon Manifesto" is just plain sweet. 

From "The City to a Young Girl:" "I'm feeling it, the purpose and point of our political writings, our personal struggles. It's not to change the world that can't or won't be changed. It's to leave traces of ourselves for others to hold on to, a lifeline of solidarity that spans time, that passes on strength like a baton from person to person, generation to generation." (page 234). Amen to that. 

From "Sister Spit Feminism:" "The thing about being a poet, a writer, an artist, is, you can't be good. You shouldn't have to be good. You should, for the sake of your art, your soul, and your life, go through significant periods of time where you are defying many notions of goodness. As female artists, we required the same opportunities to fuck up and get fucked up as dudes have always had and been forgiven for; we needed access to the same hard road of trial and error our male peers and literary inspirations stumbled down . . ." (page 268). 

Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Michael Schultz: 'Cooley High' (1975)

Cooley High (1975). Directed by Michael Schultz, who also directed Car Wash (1976), covered here last month. Here's a link. 

The setting for Cooley High is Chicago in the year 1964. A fairly low-budget film, it was a hit in the mid-1970s, an exciting time for cultural offerings. Scripted by Eric Monte, who also worked on What's Happening!! (which shifted the Cooley High setting to Los Angeles). 

Main actors include Glynn Turman as Preach, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs as Cochise, Cynthia Davis as Brenda and Garret Morris as Mr. Mason, a teacher-mentor who looks out for them. Hilton-Jacobs was also in Welcome Back, Kotter, a 1970s series that co-starred John Travolta. 

Preach shows the initially dubious Brenda that they have a shared interest in poetry. He's got a sort of Thelonius Monk-Dizzy Gillespie-Spike Lee kind of look with those glasses and, when roaming around, his cap. 

Cooley High isn't all fun and games. There's a sense of mortality hovering in the background, with a couple of poignant drinking salutes to the dead -- a custom with which I am quite familiar.

Cooley High is also nicely enriched with a Motown-powered soundtrack.

Today's Rune: Partnership.    

Robert Mitchum's 'Thunder Road' (1958)

Starting with the name, "Thunder Road" takes on mythic proportions as it flows from the 1958 Robert Mitchum movie through the 1975 Bruce Springsteen song and beyond. There's even another movie with the same title out in 2018. During the US-Vietnam War, Thunder Road was the dub name for South Vietnam's National Route 13. 

The movie Thunder Road was really Robert Mitchum's labor of love. Arthur Ripley was given the director's credits. but Mitchum was the main man for this project. Much of it was filmed in and around Asheville, North Carolina, standing in for Harlan County, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee.

Thunder Road is a bit different from what one might expect. It's largely sympathetic to moonshine runners in a largely dry American South, but also shows that change is inevitable. Gangsters are trying to take over the routes, lawmen seek to disrupt the system, generational differences are starting to emerge. 

Lucas (the Robert Mitchum character) is a veteran of the Korean War and a very tough dude, indeed. He has a spacial lady friend in Memphis and an admirer in a girl next door in the Appalachians. His younger brother Robin (played by Robert Mitchum's son James) services his smuggling cars but also wants to be a driver -- something Lucas wants to deter at all costs. The Korean War did something to him, too -- made him world weary. 

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Jim Jarmusch: 'Permanent Vacation' (1980)

Permanent Vacation (1980): the first completed effort by Jim Jarmusch, a rudimentary one shot on a shoestring budget, telegraphs his future batch of films. 

I found it interesting and fun, whereas most "regular people" would probably find it aimless and pointless. Permanent Vacation serves partly as a semi-documentary tour of bits of the New York City cityscape in the late 1970s -- shabby and in disarray.

Ali (Chris Parker), the main character, would be quite comfortable in 2018 America as a millennial man-child: weird and awkward, without much ambition or drive other than to do whatever he wants without much cash on hand, slightly brain-damaged in his social interactions. He does muster up enough energy to steal a car for $800 in cash -- hardly something to write home about. 

He seems to drift away from his pseudo-girlfriend after examining the architectural ruins of an area "bombed" by "Chinese" in a some fantasy war where he also happened to stumble on a homeless veteran of the US-Vietnam War.

Ali considers seeing a hip film and interacts with a nodding junkie jazz hepcat, with the final scene from Sergio Leone's Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo / The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966) playing in the background, just barely audible (one of the strangest touches of the entire movie).

Earlier, Ali and his pseudo-girlfriend read from Les Chants de Maldoror / Maldorer's Lay (1868-1869) by Comte de Lautréamont.

Permanent Vacation is a prototype of more "fully realized" Jarmusch films, more like Bohemian bits of flash fiction or poems loosely strung together than a longer work.  

Today's Rune: Warrior. 

Jaroslav Hašek: 'Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial:' Parte 2

Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923).

Eventually, the good soldier Švejk must ride the rails toward the Galician front. At one station, a "good man" helps him out. "When he was leaving, he told Švejk in confidence: 'So, soldier boy, take it from me, I'm telling you, if you end up a prisoner of war in Russia, pass on my greetings to Zeman, the brewer in Zdolbunov. After all, you've got my name written down. Just be smart so that you will not be at the front long.'
     'Don't worry about that,' said Švejk, 'it is always interesting to see some foreign lands for free.'"

Satire from Hašek. But his flourishes are often darker and more biting. For example, later on the very same page: 

"Mostly there were soldiers from various regiments, formations, and of the most varied nationalities whom the wisdom of war had blown into the field hospitals, and who were now departing again into the field for new injuries, maiming, pain, and who were taking off to earn a simple wooden cross for above their graves on which there would still [be] years later in the sad plains of eastern Galicia in the wind and the rain a sun-bleached military cap with a rusted "Frankie" pin on it,* upon which from time to time would perch a sad raven, grown old and tired, remembering the fat-filled feast of years ago when there used to be set for him an endless table of tasty human corpses and horse carcasses, when just under such a cap that he's sitting on, there would be a bite of the most tasty morsel -- human eyes." 

~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň and Emmett M. Joyce, 1st Books Library, 2009, page 11.

*"Rusty imperial badge" in the Cecil Parrott translation. 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.  Map from Rooted in Eastern Europe. Link here.

Amsterdam Then and Now: The Melkweg

Amsterdam: The Melkweg. Summer of 1983. Time regained through the power of photography -- and memory.   

Same frontage, summer of 2017, on a rainy night. 

Melkweg:  Lijnbaansgracht 234a
1017 PH Amsterdam                                                   Telefoon: 020-5318181
Link here  

Front of the Melkweg in daylight. Summer 2017.  All photos by Erik Donald France. 

I've written about the Melkweg for years. Here's a post from quite a little while ago. Amsterdam forever! 

Today's Rune: Partnership.

Jaroslav Hašek, 'The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War,' Part 1

Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / aka The Good Soldier Švejk (1921-1923).

Told largely from the perspective of Švejk, a Czech soldier in the service of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the Great War of 1914-1918, Hašek shows The War to be a stupid squander and Life to be Absurd. In the words of a certain Sex Pistols song, "God save this mad parade!"

I read the Penguin Books translation years ago, but last night finished the newer translation by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň (entire set, 2000-2009) and Emmett M. Joyce (Book One only), which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Švejk (rhymes with Bake) falls in and out of trouble constantly. About a third of the way into Book One, he's examined by a panel of military doctors. Is he an idiot or "a scoundrel . . . mak[ing] light of the military service?"

Does Švejk think for himself or not, the Command Chief Physician* wants to know. Not, Švejk answers. Why not?

Švejk's answer: "I dutifully report that . . . it is forbidden for soldiers in the military to think. When I was with the 91st Regiment years ago, our captain would always say, 'A soldier must not think on his own. His superiors think for him. As soon as a soldier starts thinking, then he's not a soldier anymore, but some kind of mangy civilian. Thinking doesn't lead . . ."   

~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book One. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň and Emmett M. Joyce, 1st Books Library, 2000, page 78.

Little does the officer corps realize that the entire empire will collapse by war's end, and that meanwhile, nearly all they think and do is ridiculous.

Today's Rune: Movement.

*Senior staff doctor in the Cecil Parrott translation. 

Jim Jarmusch: 'Stranger Than Paradise' (1984)

Jim Jarmusch: Stranger Than Paradise (1984) -- same year as the Coen Brothers' first movie, Blood Simple.

Stranger Than Paradise, made on a shoestring budget, is all verve and imagination, a lovely film. 

There are really only four substantive characters in it, all related by Hungarian blood or American friendship: Willie (John Lurie), his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint), their aunt Lotte (Cecillia Stark) and Willie's pal Eddie (Richard Edson). And one key song: "You Put a Spell on Me" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. All but Aunt Lotte are in movement -- New York City, Cleveland, Florida. Jarmusch employs fades between scenes, and it's shot entirely in black and white film -- elements that one will not forget. 

Stranger Than Paradise may very well be the "freshest" of all of Jim Jarmusch's films, though Gimme Danger (2016), his recent documentary on Iggy and the Stooges, is "fresh" in its own way. 

Can you dig? I love seeing such perspectives on things, what Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) dubbed --  -- one hundred and one years ago -- defamilarization. Seeing ordinary seeming people and things anew, those and that which we've become "used to" -- or tired of -- with "refreshed eyes" -- and a renewed magical sense of possibility.   

Today's Rune: Strength. 

Masahiro Shinoda: 'Pale Flower' / 'Kawaita hana' / 乾いた花 (1964)

Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower / Kawaita hana / 乾いた花 (1964). 

Whereas Seijun Suzuki's 1964 Gate of Flesh / Nikutai no mon / 肉体の門  is set in the immediate wake of the Second World War and shot in garish colors, Shinoda's 1964 film is set in the early 1960s and shot in black and white. Japan has begun to rebuild and we can recognize it as contemporary modern. But the code of gangsters (yakuza) is key to both films, and to both periods in Japanese society. So is the underground scene in general -- dangerous and alluring. 

'“There was a strong influence of [Charles] Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower.'" -- Chuck Stephens, "Pale Flower: Loser Take All" (2011), The Criterion Collection. Link here.

"Bewitchingly shot and edited . . ." The Criterion Collection has special features, all nifty. 

Who will pay the Piper? But first, who is the Piper? 

"A sumptuous sonnet to unrequited amour fou, Pale Flower remains Shinoda’s most enduring creation." -- Chuck Stephens, "Pale Flower: Loser Take All" (2011), The Criterion Collection. 

Today's Rune: Strength. 

Hiroshi Inagaki: 'The Samurai Trilogy' (1954-1956)

Hiroshi Inagaki's The Samurai Trilogy (1954-1956): five hours of cinematic groove divided into three movies revolving around the adult life of Miyamoto Musashi (circa 1584-1645), author of The Book of Five Rings, artist and winner of sixty-one (or more) sword duels, played by Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997), and based on the thick Musashi novel by Eiji Yoshikawa (1892-1962). 

We are immersed into 1600s Japan, codes of ethics, social systems, gender roles, Buddhism, philosophy, art, meditation, and death by sword-play. Musashi's character and skill develops as things move along, and look for the women, too. A sprawling epic that let's us flow along with its varying tempos.  

Hiroshi Inagaki's The Samurai Trilogy (1954-1956). In it, many die by the sword, but only "Moderate Violence" -- or so says the cover of this DVD.  I, II, III: Musashi Miyamoto (1954), Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955) and Duel at Ganryu Island (1956). 

The accompanying music by Ikuma Dan (1924-2001) adds to the pacing of the film. For about twenty seconds of the overture, you can catch the first inklings of Ennio Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold" in the main theme. (See Sergio Leone's Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo / The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966). 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Amsterdam: Now and Then

Six images from trips to Amsterdam for comparison: three shots from the Summer of 2017, and two from the Summer of 1983, plus a scanned receipt.  

Above: Museumplein. Unaltered HTC mobile phone shot. You can click on it for a larger image. The Irish green jumps off the page. Do you know the pointillist work of the French painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891)? Check out his Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte / A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886) for comparison. It's like you've entered into the scene, except without the water. Here's a link to the Art Institute of Chicago's image of it. 

Leidseplein: a busy place day and night. Unaltered HTC mobile phone shot. You can click on it for a larger image.

Stadsschouwburg, also on the Leidseplein. This one's with a Nikon Coolpix B500, compressed. 

Scanned receipt from Bob's Youth Hostel, July 1983. If I remember correctly, the cost was $3 per night at the time, in a dorm room -- equivalent to about $7.50 now. Same address: Nieuwezijds voorburgwal 92, 1012 SG, Amsterdam. Even the Telefoon number is mostly the same, with some additional prefix numbers added on for international calls. Then: 230063. Now: +31 (0) 20-6230063. The relative cost is higher now, but so are the options, including your own room.

This was probably somewhere along the way between Bob's Youth Hostel and the Melkweg. When one experiences something in an altered state, some memory details seem to float off into space. Probably Leidesgracht, Spruitstraat or Herengracht. Someone could identify this from the bell tower in the left background. Parts of Amsterdam were seedier (and "patchier," as my Londoner landlord once put it) in the Summer of 1983 than they were in 2017.

In the Summer of 1983, the 't Cafe with the Rolling Stones logo was facing the Leidseplein at or about Leidseplein 18. Later it was called the 't Cafe Black and White and seems to have since relocated. There have also been the Café Mokum and Café De Waard at the same address. So who knows anymore? There is only this image to go by. I remember that God-awful hairstyle that some people wore then. I also remember sitting on a bench and first seeing this logo during the daytime, when a dog came up to me to be petted, a Labrador mix retriever. 

Amsterdam forever! It's good to take pictures of places where you hang out because before you know it, some of them are gone! But if they're still there, all the better. 

Today's Rune: Joy.

Robert M. Young: '¡Alambrista!' (1977, 2004, 2012)

Robert M. Young's ¡Alambrista! ["tightrope walker" aka "The Illegal"] (1977, 2004, 2012), originally shot on a shoestring budget and later re-edited by the director, follows young and inexperienced Alberto (Domingo Ambriz) as he crosses into the USA from Mexico, seeking work in order to help provide for his wife and new child back home. His adventures, sometimes humorous, are more often harrowing, for all the while he is being hunted.

¡Alambrista! is similar to Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette / Bicycle Thieves (1948), but the issues at hand are more open-ended. 

Very little, it seems, has changed in the American desire for migrant labor as of the early 21st century, nor in rough, chaotic conditions for those who are able to make the initial crossing to fill demand.  

"Much like the Italian neorealists, Young discovered the effectiveness of using documentary techniques to tell fictional stories. But the Italians—De Sica, Rossellini, and Visconti, for instance—were experienced narrative filmmakers who appropriated documentary techniques to lend a sense of authenticity and immediacy to their contemporary tales of ordinary people. Young was coming from the opposite end of the filmmaking spectrum.

Steeped in the documentary tradition of journalistic objectivity, he wrestled with a paradox then slowly dawning on him: fiction could be truer than reportage."  

~ Charles Ramírez Berg, "¡Alambrista!: Inside the Undocumented Experience," The Criterion Collection (2012). Here's a link to Berg's full essay.

Another great film, proving yet again that a big budget is not necessary to make effective movies.

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.